Another $100 PC?

INQ7 reported that Rufino Mananghaya, a University of the Philippines (Los Baños) professor built a budget PC that is as thin as a pocket-book and as lightweight as a ream of bond paper and only costs $100.

Mananghaya's budget PC uses a Taiwanese mini-motherboard with 256 megabytes of memory and integrated with a Via C3 800 megahertz processor. This is barely enough to compete with most computers today but it has fewer applications to run anyway.

Instead of having a hard disk, this budget PC has been enhanced with a memory card adapter that allows it to use a Compact Flash card, which is usually used for digital cameras and MP3 players. Mananghaya used a 128 MB Compact Flash card and it’s already an operational computer.

"This computer uses Puppy Linux, which only requires less than 50 MB of memory. Then it has Open Office as a cost-effective alternative to proprietary desktop applications. Both software run in less than 128 MB of memory but the card's adapter can accommodate cards with up to 2 gigabytes," Mananghaya said.

This is very similar to MIT's $100 laptop project which aims to provide One Laptop per Child (OLPC).

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Laptop Battery Check

More and more PC manufacturers are joining Sony battery recall due to risk of overheating and/or catching fire. Dell, the world's largest PC maker, is the first to recall Sony made batteries after several reported incidents of overheating. Other companies like Apple, Lenovo/IBM, Hitachi, Sharp, Fujitsu immediately follows. Even Sony issued recall for its laptop brand Vaio which obviously uses Sony made batteries. After learning that Toshiba is included in the list, I immediately checkout my battery to verify if it is Sony made or not.

As you can see, my battery was labeled with Toshiba. I'm not sure if it is indeed Toshiba made battery or just re-labeled.